Motorhome values fell in line with seasonal trends, climbing in May, Black Book principal specialty vehicles analyst Eric Lawrence told Auto Finance News, noting the increase is in part due to an uptick in more expensive Class A motorhome sales.
“When you have a lot of those really expensive units going through, it can really knock your averages up,” he said.
Meanwhile, travel trailers saw less dramatic month-to-month value swings as the market segment is larger and not as easily influenced by higher priced models at auction, Lawrence said.
Similarly, auction volumes ticked up 10% from April to May as dealers prepare their inventories for seasonal peaks, National Powersport Auctions Vice President of RV and Marine Sales Matt Amata told AFN.
“There’s a lot more transactions, a lot of dealers buying used inventory for resale, shuffling out some older stuff,” he said. “May to June is the high point in the auction business for campers.”
Despite the increased auction volume, National Powersport Auctions saw values drop 3% to 8% in each category, in part due to a rise in book value, he added.
New inventory building
While used RV volumes are consistent with seasonal trends, dealers reported that 2024-2025 model inventory is building at a concerning level, Amata said.
“It’s still unbelievably shocking how many dealers have units [that have been on the lot for a year or more]; that comes at tremendous depreciation cost,” Amata said. “There are auctions, there’s wholesalers, there is a lot of channels that you can work through to operate more efficiently.”
Listen to this special episode of the “Weekly Wrap” podcast, as Black Book’s Lawrence and National Powersport Auction’s Amata join Auto Finance News Associate Editor Aidan Bush to discuss motorhome and towable trends for the week ended June 20.
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Editor’s note: This transcript has been generated by software and is being presented as is. Some transcription errors may remain.
It is Monday, June 23rd. And I’m Aidan Bush on this special episode. I’m joined by Eric Lawrence, the principal analyst of Specialty vehicles at Black Book, and Matthew Amata, the vice president of RV and Marine and National Power sports auction.
I’ll let them introduce themselves, but first I’d like to thank our sponsor for this week’s podcast data Scan. So how about you just kind of give a little bit of background of you know how long you’ve been with your perspective companies and kind of what your company does in the powersports space or at large?
Eric, you can kick us off. Sure. So I’m with black book and I oversee specialty vehicle valuations. You know, Black book produces values for basically any kind of vehicle out there. And so I’m I I oversee RV collectible cars, motorcycle and powersports.
Black book’s been in business since 1955, and I have been with Black Book for just around 25 years. Thank you so much, Matt. Yeah. Thanks. I’m Matt Amata.
I’m with national Powersport Auctions, vice president of marine and RV.
National Powersport Auctions is the largest power sport auction house in the US since 1990, with 10 locations and 15 sales a month. I’m in charge of the boat and RV product within that fast growing segment for us and. We’re proud to be on here and be part of this podcast. And continue our growth in the in the space. Well, thank you both so much for joining me. How about we just kick this off with sort of? Eric, how about first you kind of talk about what we’ve seen in terms of motorhome and towable values the past month kind of past few months. What is kind of sort of the general trend been you know this past season?Well, starting with with motorhomes, you know they sort of fluctuate up and down. You know, as as do the trailers. You know, it’s a very seasonal market. The last you know, prior to this month, data for motorhomes was fairly flat. We do see a spike coming up with the May data. A pretty decent increase, but there’s a caveat with that in that. I noticed in the data that a lot of the more expensive class A’s went through the market this time. So when you have a whole lot of those really expensive units going through, it can really, you know, knock your averages up up a little bit. Over on the travel trailer side, where we see a lot more volume, the data the market has been very steady for the past several months. Some ups and downs, but really nothing, nothing dramatic from month to month, month to month. Gotcha. So if if I understand it correctly, you’ve seen sort of this increase on the motorhome side in value, but as you mentioned, you know that could be in part driven by some of those more expense, expensive class A’s sort of skewing the price up. Yes. I’m I’m curious kind of Matt, what you guys are seeing on the auction side in terms of volume, some of that you know book to date you know pricing what what does that kind of look like the past month or so? Yeah. So the I pulled that out, so. From April to May, our auction volumes. Were up about 10%, which is is pretty in line with what Eric’s talking about.
Just seasonality, right? So there’s just a lot more transactions, a lot of dealers buying used inventory for resale, shuffling out some older stuff. It’s kind of the the high point may June is the high point in the auction business for for campers.The the price to book, which is Eric, measures the average sales price. We look more as a price to book. Which is not as perfect of a metric because you know, book can, particularly Eric’s competitor, can can fluctuate that book value arbitrarily from from, you know, every 60 days. So for example, the last iteration of the JD Powerbook that came out raised camper value. Is all the camper values we had on average at about 3 1/2 percent. So you know when we look at price to book, if the values of the book went up, but the dealers are still paying the same amount, it would artificially come down. But but. That said, we track price to book on a four month rolling average. And we track it by condition grade. So one through 5, price 0 through 5, zero being the worst, and five being the highest. Us across all categories April to may, it was down between 3:00 to 8% in each category. So the the lowest was the clean stuff as expected that was closer to three-point and the rougher stuff was down about 8%. So that is a a little unusual. We weren’t expecting that. But again, I think it was. It was kind of predicated by the rise in in the book value. So you know, as you’ve kind of both mentioned, we are kind of hitting the tail end of this sort of seasonal peak, you know four kind of RV and motorhome sales. How should we be kind of looking at the next few months? I know you guys have both heard me talk to you before about sort of the broader market uncertainty and whether or not that is, you know, still kind of on top of dealer mind like what? What should we be expecting come July come August? The rest of the year in terms of values and really just like you know, the amount of sales. You want to take that one, Matt? Sure. Yeah. I mean, so in prior to the the, this this call, I reached out, we have AI had mentioned a dealer sales team. That it’s 16 outside sales reps and another 10 or so inside that spend all day, every day calling on dealers and and talking to them. And so I got some feedback from them on on a call. Just anecdotally, of course. And they’ve been focusing. Very heavily on stopping in camper dealers over the last 30 days or so and getting them registered and, you know, make him aware about about our products. And so the the the aggregate feedback or the most common feedback that I got was that new sales are are Ste.But down year over year and they’re the biggest concern from the dealers is that the 2425 models are are. The inventories are are building. At a concerning level used, it seems to be better. And consistent and and and kind of the bread and butter right now the sweet spot, it seems to be that 20 to $30,000 five year or newer bumper pole unit kind of the value unit which again makes sense and again anecdotally the the the colder sell. Are the higher dollar class A’s particularly over five years old?And fifth, wheels seem to be doing the worst on those lots. So you asked about what to expect with volumes. You know, again, certainly in the in the auction space we as I mentioned, we we see pricing volumes, everything peak here in you know June probably July 4th is is always the the date that everyone sees is the the Turning point. I expect volumes to increase certainly as as dealers you know. Get through that that the summer selling season and and are trying to write their inventories going into the winter. So we we expect volumes to increase, but we also expect conversion and price to book to decrease as well. Gotcha. Thank you for that, Eric. Do you have any thoughts? Oh, pretty much what Matt said. You know the RV industry is is very seasonal and a lot of people want who are going to buy an RV for the year. They want to buy it early enough in the year where they can use it that year, so you know, late spring, early summer is where you see a lot of the RV Sales happening and you know when the RV Sales happen that that just can naturally flows through. Down down to the auctions. Later on in the year, once most of the 2025 buyers. Have already made their purchases. You’re going to see less and less of volatility in the in the market less and less turn. So that’s going to flow to a flow through, you know, as fewer buyers come in, you’re going to have fewer trade in, fewer needs to go to the auction. So it’s, you know, it’s the RV industry is very seasonal, but fairly fairly predictable. The dealers that we we have spoke to were feeling pretty confident about their inventory mix on their lots right now. Now and you know, they said that a lot of the buyers who they were talking to who were on the fence had some concerns about the overall economy. What impact tariffs might have. So what? Any of the people who were on the fence were just, you know. Feeling some of the same concerns that a lot of people feel. Yeah. And I know that kind of lines up with some kind of anecdote reporting. I’ve heard from some individual RV dealerships as well, just sort of these kind of interest rates and the broader sort of market uncertainty putting people off. Not necessarily from ever buying, but maybe just waiting to see, you know, kind of once that market uncertainty clears up for the most part. I wanted to ask you, Eric, because I know this is something we’ve talked about a handful of times before, you know, kind of looking at kind of sorry, looking back, you know, we talked about how the month to month, you know, value change can sometimes be a result. Of like you said, you know for this month for example, the fact that there’s a more expensive Class A units that are being sold some of those month to month changes can be. Just because of small factors like That how does the past say six months look compared to last year or even like, how have we been faring compared to that pre COVID time? ‘Cause, I know I’ve heard a lot of powersports dealers talking about prices and sales sort of normalizing to a pre COVID time and feel free to answer that as well. Matt, if you have any thoughts about, you know, if we’re kind of returning to a pre COVID normal. I would say so. You know, typical, you know, certainly COVID was a really crazy time within, you know, power sports boats, Rv’s, everybody wanted to, you know, do something but did not want to do it with a lot of people. So you had a lot of people who are buying things, you know, buying expensive recreational toys and whatnot that they could do in a relatively safe. Environment. And prices went up quite a bit during COVID. I think they were still digesting the COVID bubble. It seems like it’s, you know, several years ago now, but it’s really not that far. And a lot of the units that were bought during COVID, you know that still new. Enough where you’re not going to have a lot of them coming back to the market just yet. So I think that we’re still. We’re still really feeling the results of that initial COVID market. I think. That there were a lot of buyers that were pulled in. Some buyers were, you know, were buyers that had not considered either an RV or a boat or a motorcycle prior that went ahead and bought one. You had a lot of buyers who maybe were looking for one in a couple years who bought it early. So they could start, start using it. So there was definitely a huge spike in volume across all of the recreational type of vehicles. And I think that we’re just, you know we’re it’s that’s all really not that long. Long ago. So we’re definitely still, we’re definitely still dealing with with that, that spike in both volume and and in prices.Yeah. Let me let me reframe that a little bit for you, Matt. I guess not looking just at these past few months, but sort of 2025 overall, how has auction volume compared this year to maybe the past year and you know is are we seeing some of that you know pre COVID normalization? Yeah, that that’s we talked about that all the time and certainly as Eric’s mentioned, you know in the, in the camper space, in the boat space as well, there’s just not a ton of data. Just ’cause there’s not that many transactions. There’s such smaller markets. Even if you had all the information, it still would be fairly imperfect because there can be anomalies that can skew it off. But but. We look at on the power sports side, we have 30 years of really good data. And we we compare a lot of the sales and and auction volumes and data to. The invoice, which is a nice stable number. So for example, we could say a power sport unit that we sold three years later. You know what? What was the invoice? What was the depreciation amount to to three years and we can look at that over a period of time. So if you lay that chart of 30 years of data out, you see. Exactly what Eric was talking about that that around 2020, one 2223, the price value spike, the sales price was was dramatically higher and every other year it’s a fairly steady curve that lays on top of each other with seasonality. And we’re seeing it. We’ve seen it come sliding back, but it still, you know, 5 to 10% above where it should be. And as far as auction values we we saw. Repo volume. Our auction volumes consist of of lots of different sources, right? They they consist of repos. They consists of dealer trades. They consist of of OEM sales. You know factory sales. So and it’s it’s a mix of all those repo volumes were were up last year not tremendously. But but they were up a bit. And so yeah, we’re we’re we’re tracking very closely to 1920 to right before COVID. Good. Right now and almost all metrics but but I think. To Eric astutely pointed out that those those units sold in 2223. At these ridiculously high. Prices are going to probably take a good five years to wash through, right? So it probably won’t be until the 28th season that you’ve seen that effect fully wash out and you can compare apples to apples to pre COVID numbers. Gotcha. We don’t have a whole lot of time left, but I do want to kind of offer for both of you to just kind of if there’s one sort of key take away you think our listeners should be thinking about in terms of the past month or months for. The RV market. Like what? That key take away would be. And I can pass it whoever whoever is most comfortable with that. Well, I’ll go ahead and start this one. So we always like to tell customers that, you know, don’t worry so much about what the data does on a month to month basis because the data is, is imperfect. It’s whatever goes through the auction. You know that month it’s, you know, and that could be with regard to the mix of products it could be with regard to what the various quality was. So we always tell people to look for the for the trends and when we see things trending down or or trending. Up we feel pretty comfortable about saying, OK, this is what is going on. Right now, we’re not seeing anything dramatic. High or or low, you know you do have the spikes. That might happen either high or low from month to month. But if you look at it, you know from an overall it’s the market is is behaving, you know relatively calmly and we don’t see anything you know. Crazy on the horizon. Do you want me to take that in? Yeah, I was gonna say if there, if there’s anything else. If if not, that’s completely fine as well. Yeah, I I mean, I I would say this is that we are part of our education with our dealers. We do education events. Like I said, we we call on dealers and we talk all the time. I talk to dealer groups. Our education always revolves around the same type of thing is that with higher interest rates, the dealers were were lulled with really low floorplan rates. And so now that floorplan rates are higher and and and that caring cost for units is tremendously higher. There’s a renewed interest in in fluidity and and inventory management and so know what that is. Embrace the data and don’t don’t sit on inventory. Right. It’s still unbelievably shocking how many dealers have units that that have birthdays and that that comes at a tremendous caring cost, a tremendous depreciation cost. There are auctions, there’s wholesalers, there’s lots of channels that you can work through. To to operate more efficiently. And and right size your inventory and that’s new and used, right? So that’s what we always like to educate and talk about all the time is to understand that data, use that data data and use the channels that are out there and don’t fall in love with something. Just be, you know, with on a hope and a dream that that you’re going to get out of it. Move off it quickly and and move on to something that you can make money on. Hmm. Well, thank you both. Get a Matt and Eric. I really appreciate you both kind of carving time out of your schedules to chat with me and kind of inform our listeners about what you’ve seen the past few months in terms of RV trends. Thank you also to datascan for sponsoring this episode. Their new Risk Age solution allows financers to tap real time analytics and avoid missing red flags between audits. And thank you for joining us on the roadmap. Be sure to follow us on X and LinkedIn and we will see you online at Autofinance News net. And hopefully we’ll see you here next time as well.